Faculty
Professer Tor Hernes, Professor, and Associate professor Chris Mathieu, Department of Organization, CBS

Course Coordinator
Associate professor Chris Mathieu, Department of Organization, CBS

This course has two primary and intertwined purposes. The first is to present the current thinking and lines of divisions and proposed solutions to central, advanced controversies and debates in organizational analysis. The second purpose is to facilitate a dialog with the participating students about: how these debates might be relevant to their own PhD projects; where possible; the debates discussed.

As the title of the course reflects, focus is on seeing how broad social scientific debates and issues have been applied in the analysis of organizations and organizing/organizational processes. Thus these issues are broad and central, meaning that they are debated outside the ambit of organization theory/analysis, but this breadth and centrality also means that virtually any study of organizing or organizational phenomena necessarily must (and do – explicitly or implicitly) touch upon most of these issues in some way or another. This course is designed to equip you to gain awareness of, where and when these issues can arise, how they are dealt with in contemporary organizational analysis, and how you can explicitly deal with them.

The course focuses on four topics or areas of controversy. The first is the levels of analysis/levels of explanation issue. Here we look at several examples of dividing up the analytical world of relevance to organizational analysis, how explanations of phenomena are offered at these levels and how the linking or disjuncture between levels is dealt with. One central point of debate is whether explanatory primacy is top-down (macro-primacy), bottom-up (micro-primacy) or unique and generated at each particular analytical level. To a certain extent this issue builds upon and can be seen as a current version of the classic micro-(meso)-macro controversy. The second topic is what we call the sociality-materiality debate. Here we explore the claims primarily associated with Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) that the role of the material is grossly underplayed or absent in the social sciences in general and organizational studies as well. We also look at the counterclaims that at least some ANT over-mphasize the material and underemphasise or entirely neglect central social processes. The third topic examines three basic forms of explanation and orientation: action/agency; structural; and relational. Each one of these perspectives makes a claim for explanatory priority, and each perspective allows for its perspective to be “scaled up or down” - allowing for us to speak of micro- to macro-actors and micro- to macro-structures that are active in and bear on organizational phenomena. A more recent challenge to both the agency and structural perspectives comes from relational theorizing, which posits that both “substantialist” perspectives are inherently flawed. The fourth topic looks at the tension between various forms of (critical) realism and various forms of social constructivism/constructionism, as they have played out in organizational theory and analysis.

The course runs over two and a half days at Copenhagen Business School. The first day starts with a brief introduction to the course – its structure, aims and practical details, and a brief presentation of the teachers and PhD students. The rest of the first day is devoted to two topics - one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The second day also takes up two topics - one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The third day is devoted to a round-table discussion and wrap-up, where an effort is made to show how the four topics interrelate, where methodological and theoretical compatibilities and incompatibilities lie, and possibly practical means of brokering these issues in your PhD projects.

Each topic is dealt with roughly in the same fashion with a lecture/presentation by the teacher, followed by a small group discussions where you apply the topic to your individual PhD projects, and then a plenary session - taking up theoretical and more specific/practical issues generated in the small group discussions.

Participiants role
The PhD student is required to present a five-pages (maximum), written presentation (in English), in which she/he relates parts of the curriculum literature in the course to his or her project. The presentation must include specific references to the literature applied. Deadline for submission of presentations is 19 November, 2008.

The student presentation should provide material for discussion in minor groups during the course, and the student must be willing to participate in discussions of other presentations.

Levels of analysis/levels of explanation and sociality/materiality
* AG Scherer (2003) “Modes of explanation in organization theory” in Tsoukas & Knudsen The Oxford Handbook of Organization Theory
* Tor Hernes’ (2007) Understanding Organizations as Process: Theory for a Tangled World, London: Routledge.

Action/agency; structural; and relational
* Ira Cohen “Theories of Action and Praxis”
* M Emirbayer “Manifesto for a relational sociology” American Journal of Sociology 103(2): 281-317
* S Fuchs (2001) “Beyond Agency” Sociological Theory 19(1): 24-40.

Critical realism and social construcivism
* N Fairclough (2005) “Discourse analysis in organization studies: the case for critical realism” Organization Studies 26(6) 915-939
* Articles in the “roundtable debate” on discourse, organization and epistemology written by Oswick, Keenoy, Grant & Marshak; Chia; Parker; Reed; Chia (again) and Oswick, Keenoy, Grant & Marshak (again) in the journal Organization (2000) v.7(3): 511-544
* S Fleetwood (2005) “Ontology in Organization and Management Studies: a critical realist perspective” Organization 12(2): 197-222.